Emmanuelle (2024)

Eyes Without A Gaze

Emmanuelle (2024)
Directed by Audrey Diwan
France/USA 2024
Pathe Zone B Blu Ray


Okay... I was so thrown by this anniversary ‘remake’ of Emmanuelle that I almost don’t know where to start and am unsure  as to whether I should completely condemn it or admit that some of the elements of the film work as their own thing... without having anything to do with the franchise it was supposed to be celebrating. I’ve seen some of the comments about this and can well understand the disappointment and vitriol aimed at this movie and, I think it’s because the film really is a sheep hiding in wolf’s clothing. I’ve also read some of the director’s rationale behind making this from a feminist perspective and her shift to ‘the female gaze’ as opposed to the male and making this film from a feminine point of view. 

So okay, before I throw up some merits I believe the film has, I need to address some of the things that are wrong with it because, it irks me that something which is supposed to fit in with the famous (and rightly notorious, if you’ve read my reviews of the books) property is so antiseptic in its outlook. 

So let’s first look at the director. This film came out 50 years after the famous 1974 adaptation and is therefore, one would assume, something made to mark that occasion. However, the director has gone on record saying she’s never seen the original film. Why do modern day movie makers somehow seem to think it’s impressive not to be familiar with the source of their creations... it just makes you seem like sloppy examples of cast and crew (the number of superhero actors and actresses who say they’ve never read a comic annoys me in a similar manner)? However, she was given Emmanuelle Arsan’s original novel to read and, honestly, apart from one (maybe two) scenes in the film... this is completely divorced from that novel too. 

I mean, Emmanuelle, as played here by Noémie Merlant, embodies none of the characteristics of the original character and, as importantly, the film misunderstands... I feel... the basic tenets of Marryat Rollett-Andriane (aka Emmanuelle Arsan) and her husband’s philosophies revolving around love and sex. The whole point of those novels is that the young Emmanuelle is married and she and her husband enhance, strengthen and maintain their bond by having sexual adventures (both apart and sometimes together) with other people. It’s about free love and the way sex can sometimes bring one closer to one’s other half (I’ve witnessed this effect in real life). Emmanuelle, as she is in the books and the first two movie adaptations, is a smart (but often naive), fun loving, joyful creature who is up for anything, mostly on her own terms and wed to a rich husband who can fund her playgirl lifestyle. 

In this modern incarnation, Emmanuelle is a fair bit older than the original character, is not married, has a job as a hotel inspector and, as the bitter cherry on the poison cake, while still being somewhat sexually adventurous (kinda) she’s stoic, aloof, distant, cold, mostly humourless and somewhat disconnected from humanity. This is not Emmanuelle in any way, shape or form. Both the spirit of the character and of the initial books/films is completely lost here. 

And as far as the dominant female gaze here... yes, I’m a bloke so I’m never going to be an authority on such things (or should even be warranted thoughts on the matter) but, I should point out that the original Emmanuelle certainly had her own agency and, especially in the case of the Black Emanuelle films, she was definitely a confident, feminist woman in a series of films which have been very much re-evaluated and recognised as such. So this new incarnation, which seems almost to reject Arsan’s spirit and ideas, just doesn’t seem to work for me. I mean, the film is not boring, as many people seem to suggest and it’s also not a bad movie (although certainly a very bad Emmanuelle movie) but if I were to actually believe this movie is a representation of what women want to see then, alas, my takeaway would be that women don’t really like sex and can take it or leave it. 

Also, there’s a bit more nudity than people are saying in the film but, not much (not even as much as the 1974 film and that was not exactly loaded with the female form) and many of the sex scenes are either clothed or executed without showing many, or oftimes any, sexual body parts of the participants. 

There are one, possibly two scenes that are reflective of the original novel. The movie opens with a version of the airline sex scene (but much tamer) which opened the book and was relocated to another part of the original movie (and also opened the first Black Emanuelle film if memory serves). It takes the form of a pre-title sequence but, I don’t think it’s all that strong an opening to the film, I would say. 

The other scene which may be an homage to the masturbation scene with Emmanuelle and the underage girl (13) in the book (and slightly less underage girl, 17, in the original film) is half recreated here with this film’s Emmanuelle and someone who turns out to be a female escort (if I understood it correctly). It feels like it’s almost there by accident or is just a passing, token homage, to be fair.

And that’s it. Now let me tell you what the film seems to be on its own terms...

Well, it’s beautifully shot with nice use of slow camera movement which is also used to highlight travelling cuts which bring back zooms in or out on the same scene in one fluid motion. The film tries to be erotic by using things like a visual montage of people rubbing things (such as cleaners wiping bannisters in the hotel run by Margot Parson, played by Naomi Watts) and I am assuming that this is an attempt to subliminally arouse the senses of the audience but, well, for me it just fell flat and didn’t move the blood or quicken the heart in the way it might be hoped (admittedly, this is apparently a deliberate tactic of the director... but then you just have nothing really happening so, why?). The film does tend to live in a voyeuristic world but, again, it has none of the carefree spirit of the original works.

I was especially on the alert after we see the lead taking a bath in her hotel room near the start of the film because, shortly after, in the very next scene, she informs somebody she has just taken a shower. Which is obviously a glaring continuity error and makes me think the bath scene maybe replaced the shower from an earlier version of the script but the scene straight after was not reshot to match up with the content of that footage. So, yeah, I was immediately on guard after this small moment. 

And I did kind of enjoy watching these bored and disillusioned people wandering about aimlessly in an upperclass, exclusive, rich person’s world and have meaningless conversations. Noémie Merlant’s almost deadpan performance is actually quite good, just completely wrong for Emmanuelle... but she’s playing her as it’s been written, not as a credible version of the original character. And I loved the score by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine which, alas, is not released as a standalone CD (no, seriously, don’t give me your stupid digital downloads, I want the proper, physical release please). I mean, it’s not the kind of score you’d expect or want in an Emmanuelle film but, as I think I’ve argued throughout this review, this really isn’t an Emmanuelle film and has none of that spirit about it anyway so, why not?

So, at the end of the day, it’s not a terrible film by any means but, it’s not an Emmanuelle movie (although I can see why some people, even those unfamiliar with the original works, would find this sluggish compared to whatever else they are watching). It’s almost like the director was handed the keys to the kingdom for the fiftieth anniversary and deliberately undermined the essence of the original and just wanted this to be a slap in the face of the male and female fans of the original (don’t forget, that original movie was released mainstream and was a popular ‘couples’ movie with a dominant female audience, from what I have heard). So, yeah, I’m guessing most people will take ot or more likely leave this incarnation but, it’s not completely without merit... just don’t judge it against your deserved expectations of the film, for sure. 

Laure (aka Forever Emmanuelle)

Emm-Annie-Belle

Laure
aka Forever Emmanuelle
Directed by Emmanuelle Arsan/
Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane and
Roberto D’Ettorri Piazzoli 
Italy/France 1976
Severin DVD Region 0

Warning: Light spoilers.

Well, here we go again. Laure is the movie adaptation (possibly, I’ll address that because… I have a theory) of Emmanuelle Arsan’s book of the same name (reviewed by me here). And you can read my book review for the story content of what goes on as directed above… I’m wasting no time on the plot here.

But here’s the thing... as Severin’s DVD* sleeve promotes it, “The Uncensored Erotic Odyssey Co-Starting, Written and Directed by the Real-Life Emmanuelle”. And at least some of that is true. She has a large role as Myrte here so, if you were ever wondering what the real life Emmanuelle looked like… well… there’s a lot of her on show, so you won’t be disappointed.

Whether she actually directed this is debatable. Certainly both her husband and constant collaborator Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane, were a presence on the film and at least one of the actors I’ve read about says Emmanuelle Arsan was not directing. But then, depending on what that means to you, there could have been a lot of input by her fed through to her husband who may have been more blatantly filling that role behind the scenes so… I have no idea.

The other reason I wanted to watch this one for the blog, asides from Arsan herself, is lead actress Annie Belle, who I still obsess over occasionally due to her dominant presence in Jean Rollin’s Lips Of Blood (reviewed here). Her presence is equally striking in this film and here, she’s teamed up with Al Cliver playing the photographer/moviemaker Nicholas. I think I’ve only ever seen him in Lucio Fulci horror movies to date so it was good seeing him playing something a little different to what I know him for.

The last of the four important characters from the book is Professor Gaultier Morgan, played here by Orso Maria Guerrini.

And talking of the book, it’s almost all here in the movie, which turns out to be a very straight adaptation, not missing too many details, of the original novel. Not only that but it’s very well put together with some striking cinematography. For example, a shot of Cliver’s head filling screen right completely blurred with Belle’s head filling the left hand space, equally large, while water rapidly rushes around the rocks they are laying on as a constant moving background while they converse.

Another scene where Laure and Nicholas make love while her sexual exploits, as recorded by him, are used as a backdrop to them, often dominating the screen or sharing frame space equally, is quite stunning. Ditto for a torchlit greeting as their expedition’s boat reaches the shore of their landing destination at twilight. Both tranquil and spectacular simultaneously.

And there’s some nicely rendered sexual content as well. For example, when Myrte has sex with Gaultier’s wife, there is a scene where Arsan is seen licking the long protruding blossom of a flowering plant which is resting over the other woman’s vulva, this alluding to what is going on while steering clear of the censors, with the tip of the flower she sucks as a surrogate for the other woman’s clitoris.

Now then, lets get to that big old elephant in the room of underage sex which keeps coming up to sour me every time I jump into Arsan’s legacy, out of the way. Yeah, the two little girls from the first and last part of the book are in this and, unlike the movie version of Emmanuelle (reviewed here), they are played by little girls who are roughly the same age as they are in this book. However, a sex scene with the Mara girl, Myrte and Gaultier, thankfully doesn’t make it into the final cut of the movie (thank goodness). Similarly, a scene where Laure masturbates at the tea table for the little girl cuts off just before that sequence fully plays out… although it does still include the moment where she’s staring in fascination at Laure’s exposed sex. And if you’ve already read the book… you know what’s going on. So let’s all condemn that scene and just pretend it didn’t happen. Whether any of the cast had read the book and discussions were had on set is anyone’s guess. But, moving on…

Okay, so Laure is a pretty close adaptation of the original novel. So close, in fact, that I wonder if the novel and the film didn’t gestate at the same time, such as with the movie and film versions of The Girl With All The Gifts (reviewed here and here). That being said, two of my favourite sequences from the book, the ‘wet camera’ scene** and the ‘penis tree’ scene, as detailed in yesterday’s review, don’t happen in the movie version. I wonder if they attempted them and they just looked too silly or whether they didn’t even try?

And... the ending is a little different. The book ends with Myrte, Gaultier and the disillusioned Nicholas leaving Laure, who is the only one who wants to continue in the company of the Mara tribe and take part in the festival of the new sun. And that’s a good ending. Here, we see Laure take part in that ritual and… it’s a bit of a letdown, frankly. A kind of empty coda which the film just doesn’t need, at least that’s what I think.

So that’s me done with the movie adaptation of Laure. Obvious subtext aside, it’s a pretty beautiful film with a wonderful score by Franco Micalizzi (sadly out of print on CD and I’ve so far found it impossible to source a copy, if you have any reasonably priced leads on the Digitmovies CD then let me know) and, well, Emmanuelle Arsan turns in an amazingly good performance in this too. Seeming more natural and confident in her role than much of the rest of the cast, it seems to me. So even if you are just interested in seeing it for her… yeah, definitely worth a watch if you can find a copy. This definitely needs a modern Blu Ray restoration.

*Yeah, there’s no Blu Ray as of yet and, well, it took me three different ebay sellers to finally get a copy of the old Severin DVD of the film. Two said they had it, took my money and then failed to deliver the goods!

** Thanks to Austin Gentry, who jumped onto Twitter yesterday after I'd posted my review of the novel and who is researching and writing a book about Annie Belle, for the info that, when this was still considered as a project to star Linda Lovelace, the camera scene was still in the script.

Laure (the novel)

Tree Hugger

Laure
by Emmanuelle Arsan
Granada
ISBN 0583130291

Trigger warning: Taboo and illegal practices discussed and condemned.

Okay, I’m going to say up front that I almost wish I hadn’t started reading some of Emmanuelle Arsan’s books for this blog because, well, I found a sinister and dark underbelly to her celebrated writing that is somehow not publicised or addressed when people discuss or write about these ‘classic’ novels... at least that I could find. 

Anyway, apart from a few scenes, I mostly enjoyed Laure and it’s a strange book. Whether it’s written by Arsan or her husband is somewhat debatable but, again, certain inconsistencies in the writing and the fact that I’d heard Arsan used to be constantly slaving away over a hot typewriter leads me to believe this was a truly collaborative effort between her and her husband.

Now then... this book tells the story of Laure, a minister’s daughter who, along with some friends who also study at the Lance Institute of Pacific Studies (LIPS... that’s subtle then), goes off into the jungle on a trek to find the mostly lost and hard to find Mara tribe and rebirth herself in the ‘ritual of the new sun’. It’s full of sexual experiences since, of course, the characters all practice the philosophies of sexuality as expounded upon already in the Emmanuelle novels. And I was kinda hoping that certain elements would not come up in this one but... oh yeah, by the end of the book, things get quite blatant concerning certain illegal practices. 

Okay, so the novel has a strange structure in that it tells the tale as first person narrative from three different characters... none of them actually Laure. So part one is called Nicholas and is seen through the eyes of Laure’s soon-to-be boyfriend and then husband, who is a photographer and film artist. This chapter lasts for about two thirds of the book. It involves a really odd sexual scene too, which I hope made it into the movie adaptation because it’s so strange, where Laure makes love to Nicholas’ camera, eventually leaving it totally covered in saliva and other bodily fluids. 

Then we have a second chapter called Myrte, which lasts only twelve pages and is told from the point of view of her character, who I believe is the character that Emmanuelle Arsan actually plays herself in the movie version of this one. It’s odd because the wedding of Nicholas and Laure, which wasn’t even something you could see coming from the first section, is mentioned as something that has already happened by this part of the story as it jumps a little in time. So... I dunno... somewhat expository dialogue dressed up as something else, I guess.

Finally, we have the last section told from the eyes of Gaultier, which also features a bizarre revenge/death scene from one of the characters, with the character who is the target of said revenge not even noticing that her enemy (she doesn’t even realise she has one) has unwittingly met his demise. Which is done quite well and almost acts like a jump scare to the reader. 

There’s also an amazing scene where the four friends find a tree with big penises growing from it (one of many such foliage it would seem), as opposed to carvings but they are identical to the real thing and give out sap when... well, you can see where this is going. Laure spends an awful lot of time making love to two such protuberances on the tree, one in her mouth and one in her nether regions (Annie Sprinkle, with her current ecosexual philosophies, would surely embrace this concept and has surely done a version of this stuff) over and over, where she possibly fertilises herself by the tree. Or so it’s set up as a possibility here. 

The end of the novel, I suspect, differs from the end of the film but I won’t know until I watch that (I went to a lot of trouble, including two bizarre dead ends to get hold of an out of print DVD of the film put out by Severin back in the day) but, I hope another way it differs is not to include the absolutely vile scenes of underage sexuality, which are somehow even more invasive than those found in the Emmanuelle books... and I really didn’t expect to see them here, they do come out of the blue, somewhat. 

But that’s enough of that other than to say, I looked into the legality of these books because I couldn’t believe they’ve been allowed to be published and, somehow through loopholes in the legal system, they’ve been allowed by various governments around the world. Which, okay, I can understand that (Lady Chatterley’s Lover etc) but, what I find unbelievable is why this element of these books has not been called out by readers over the years so people know what they’re getting into when they read these things. 

But that’s enough of my unexpected (even to me) preaching. I actually thought that, out of the three Arsan novels I’ve read, Laure was the most interesting and entertaining. Although, the writing is somewhat shaky in places because it keeps drifting between past and present tense (perhaps an unwitting sign of dual authorship?). And I’ll leave it at that... I guess the next review on here will be the movie version. So hopefully you’ll look in tomorrow. 

I, Emmanuelle

Erotic Breakdown

I, Emmanuelle
aka Io, Emmanuelle
aka A Man For Emmanuelle
aka Emmanuelle
Directed by Cesare Canevari
Italy 1968
Rofima Cinematografica
Severin Films Blu Ray
as part of their Saga Erotica Emmanuelle Collection

Warning: All the spoilers for this wonderful film. 

Wow. Just wow. 

Sometimes a Blu Ray label... and it seems @severinfilms are particularly adept at this... will put out a film that absolutely knocks your socks off, blows your mind and reminds you why you started partaking of ‘the cinematic arts’ in the first place. Which is what I, Emmanuelle did to me when I watched it but, to be honest, I was debating whether to make this review part of my Emmanuelle Arsan At NUTS4R2 strand of movies at all. And the simple reason for that is... it’s got absolutely nothing to do with Emmanuelle Arsan. 

However, I can see why Severin decided to include it as part of their Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection Blu Ray boxed set and so, since it’s such a good movie and it does have a very remote connection, I thought I’d include it here where it can get more exposure. And here’s why...

This film predates Emmanuelle (reviewed here) by five years and it wasn’t trying to bandwagon onto that movie... however, it was trying to band wagon onto the notoriety of Arsan’s original novel. Now, we’re all used to seeing Italians produce waves of knock offs around particular genres and also titles. I mean, how many spaghetti westerns which have absolutely nothing to do with Django include the name Django in their title? Hundreds, right? Well, here we have the Italians Django-ing Emmanuelle’s name onto the title of the film and calling their main character after her. But, in fact, it’s based on a short story called Disintegration ‘68, written by Graziella Di Prospero. And, I almost pity the man (or woman) in the street when this came out thinking they were walking into a sexy, erotic Emmanuelle movie because, although the film does deal with sex... it’s certainly not all that sexy and is a real downer of a movie, quite deliberately so, it seems to me. 

So the film starts with such a texturally swirling camera movement going in 360 degree circles that I initially thought there was something wrong with my Blu Ray copy, Then we get glimpses of the main star, Erika Blank, as she’s swirling around in a spinning chair. And this trope of a camera doing those loops is echoed throughout the film, sometimes with the camera itself or sometimes with a character who’s looping around on their own. It even points out the cyclic nature of the film itself and that opening camera shot is something we’ll come back to in the end with the ‘ritual of milk’ scene... we’ll get there. 

And this turns out ot be a movie about a severely depressed woman on the verge of losing herself to either a nervous breakdown or suicide. Indeed, Emmanuelle sometimes jump cuts in her head to a vision of herself landed on the street below, after she has thrown herself out of her flat, in little moments that crash into the visuals and collective audience consciousness in exactly the same way that a movie by Nicolas Roeg would do it. Completely disorienting the viewer as much as it does Emmanuelle and it’s just one small part of a sensual attack which builds up into a cacophony of visual and audio invasions on the audience. Again, as much as it does to the central character. So things like advertising slogans blaring in her head simultaneously pitched with newsreel atrocities from the Vietnam war and a ‘strung up like a puppet’ Action Man which she keeps seeing, manifesting itself in real life, as the sound of pigs eating matches the visuals of diners in a high class restaurant stuffing their faces and they suddenly turn into real life flesh versions of said Action Man. It’s amazing stuff.

So the story, such as it is, sounds like it could be a movie taking on the tenets of Emmanuelle Arsan... but it really isn’t. 

Emmanuelle can’t find her boyfriend, who has left his house without telling her he was going to be away. So this film follows her wandering the streets and spaces of Italy for the day, completely depressed and trying to find a man to sex her up. She goes through a number of lovers but, each time they start to sexy her up as she requests, she turns frigid at their touch and this ultimately ends up with her being both hostile and destructive to each suitor. For example, burning a writer’s new novel manuscript while he’s in the bath after failing to satisfy her... or stealing a charm given to a lover by his mother, in terms of the film’s most famous actor (besides the well loved Erika Blanc), Adolfo Celi (yup, Largo from Thunderball, reviewed here, is in this and, he keeps turning up in films I’ve been watching lately), playing against type somewhat as a pretty decent person, suckered into playing Emmanuelle’s game.

And as the film progresses through various encounters with people like this... including a self harming escort who burns himself with cigarettes... we watch Emmanuelle’s slow but constant and intense breakdown manifesting itself... with absolutely beautiful and often experimental cinematography. 

For instance, the director might start a shot with everything just a blur for five to ten seconds. And the sound design matches the chaotic nature of the movie, where he uses that tried and trusted cliché of switching from an intense build up of sound to total silence in the next shot, used as a transition. And the shot compositions! My gosh...

For instance, after five or so minutes of the film has gone by and Erika’s Emmanuelle takes to the streets, we see a street with two lamp posts on either side of it as we look down at her, cutting it into thirds and with her firmly placed in the middle third. Or, when she is talking to a woman in a restaurant and the woman has her head and shoulders to us, with her fingers and thumb rested against the side of her head, the rest of the shot is a blur except for... Emmanuelle’s right eye seen on left of screen, showing through the little ‘o’ of a gap created by the other woman’s hand against her head. It’s astonishing stuff, I tell you. 

If I were to try and give you a sense of what this film is like from referencing other works... well first I would say that it’s a film very much of its time, you just couldn’t make something like this today and get away with it... and that it reminded me of the kinds of surreal, contemporary prose that writers like J. G. Ballard and Thomas M. Disch used to submit to New Worlds science fiction magazine back in the sixties when Michael Moorcock was calling the shots. Or, in cinematic terms, it’s like watching Jack Cardiff’s Girl With A Motorcycle but cross pollinated with an unhealthy dose of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.

So, yeah, this movie is a portrait of a woman in breakdown and she’s quite startlingly played by Erika Blanc here. Okay, so she’s a big genre star of things like Italian horror and gialli but she’s never been a favourite of mine. Here though, she looks astonishingly beautiful, even when she’s constantly suffering from stomach cramps... and, I dunno, she should have got the Italian equivalent of an Oscar for this performance. She’s absolutely stunning and it’s completely riveting. 

The last scene of the film... and this sees us deep into spoiler territory folks... sees her back on her spinning chair in her flat, a while after learning the lover who left has burned to death in a car crash earlier in the day. She nearly shoots herself but instead shoots a photo of herself and then goes through a cleansing ritual on the chair, which somehow involves her pouring milk overspilling her mouth onto her naked body (much like Salvador Dali used to say he did each morning at breakfast, after getting dressed as a kid). I didn’t really understand it, to be honest but, it looks kinda pretty and, again, like all the nude scenes in the movie (of which there are too few), it looks really great. 

And on top of that... on top of all of that... the film has an absolutely stonking score by the great Gianni Ferrio, one of my favourite Italian composers to be fair. And it’s expectedly amazing, sounding a little like the composers score for Death Walks At Midnight crashed together with his score for Death Occurred Last Night. And as the ultimate cherry on top of all of this... the vocals on the main song are sung by no less an artist as... Mina. Yup, the great Mina lends her vocalisations to this movie and it really lingers in the ear canals I can tell you that. And, thankfully, the almighty Severin Films have seen fit to include a CD of the score bundled in with this set. So, yeah, this film and its CD are well worth the price of admission alone.

And that’s me done with Io, Emmanuelle, I think. An astonishing film which lives up to that old cliché of something cinematic being an assault on the senses. I am so going to revisit this movie every few years to remind myself just why I got into watching movies in the first place. I’m sure this movie must feel like what taking a drug must feel like. Just astonishing stuff.

Goodbye Emmanuelle

The Goodbye Gal

Goodbye Emmanuelle
aka Emmanuelle 3
Directed by François Leterrier
France 1976
Severin Films Blu Ray

Warning: Some end of movie spoilers here.

Goodbye Emmanuelle is a bit of an outlier in terms of the original Emmanuelle trilogy (if you choose to group them like that… and many people do). Perhaps the giveaway is in the opening credits where it states it’s based on the character Emmanuelle rather than actually taking any of Emmanuelle Arsan’s books as a source inspiration. That would certainly explain a couple of things.

Two big things which make this stick out like a sore thumb, plus one aside about the trilogy of films’ ‘supposed’ status of softcore pornography (they’re not but then I’m loathe to pigeonhole anything under the ridiculous  label ‘art film’ either). 

One is... it’s structured like a more mainstream movie, which I’ll expand on in just a second and the other is that, despite not being based on one of Arsan’s novels, it actually, for the first third of the film, upholds the original writer and her husband’s ideologies of an open marriage with no jealousy. More so, I think, than the first two movies did. However, the rest of the movie does go on to completely betray that open spirit, it seems to me and, I suspect Arsan herself would not have been happy with the direction this movie takes.

Once again, Emmanuelle is played both sensitively and intelligently as a somewhat more naive character, it seemed to me, by the great Sylvia Kristel. And Umberto Orsini returns from the previous film as her husband Jean.

Okay, so the film actually has a storyline of sorts, dealing with Emmanuelle’s pursuit of a film director, played by Jean-Pierre Bouvierre (Kristel’s soon to be real life romantic partner Ian McShane failed the audition for this part because he couldn’t speak fluent French, it would seem), who is scouting locations in her neighbourhood. When they get it on, leading to a temporary rejection of her by this new guy, Jean becomes uncharacteristically jealous and it all ultimately leads to he and Emmanuelle splitting up at the end and her leaving the country, in pursuit of this new guy. Which, as I said, completely fails the tenets of both her characters’ and the original author’s (or authors’, depending on what you believe) philosophies on love and eroticism.

Now, the thing about the structure of the movie is that, while it has a few erotic episodes… with even less sex than the previous instalments… it’s not as episodic in feel to the previous two movies, nor indeed, the novels those movies purported to be adapting. So it’s not as loose and even the acting is more ensemble in nature than those previous two (almost as if someone had asked Robert Altman to direct an Emmanuelle movie).

There’s even a metaphor at one point, when an old man tells Emmanuelle and her latest lover a story about his wife getting eaten in front of him by a shark. It turns out not to be true and a story the guy tells because he can’t face the fact his wife ran off with another guy but, I think by this point in the film it’s more a comment of the rocky marriage of Emmanuelle and Jean in a metaphorical way, more than anything else.

The sex scenes are much more expressionistic impressions than even the previous two (which were similar but not quite as brief as these ones) but they do at least punctuate the film at regular intervals as though one of the producers, who was about to become mayor (or much higher I believe) wanted to maintain the impression that it’s still an erotic movie of sorts, without wanting to offend his voters.

Another thing is that the ensemble scenes and the noisy ‘gathering’ scenes (where Kristel performs a cute but overly long dance) have the effect of imbuing the long, quieter sequences with the impression of it being a much more reflective film than it, perhaps, actually is.

Also... different times. When Emmanuelle beds her maid at the start of the film (with her husband arriving home and joining in half way through), she has to make up a ridiculous story for her to tell the woman’s waiting husband because of his jealousy. Later on, the same housemaid has a big black eye because her husband caught her sitting on another man’s lap. But nothing in the dialogue or acting seems to express that he was wrong to hit his wife and… yeah.. like I said, different times.

The saving grace of the film (and that’s not Serge Gainsbourg’s score and his dodgy title song) is the absolutely beautiful cinematography, which matches the previous movie for sheer beauty… and of course, a fair few shots of the beautiful body of the lead actress… she seems to be very photogenic, for sure. But that’s about it for me and the movie Goodbye Emmanuelle. The film ends with a long held note of melancholy and its sad to see Sylvia’s ‘almost swan song’ - she would return briefly for the fourth to have her appearance somehow magically altered at the start by plastic surgery into a much younger actress* - in the role see her go out on such a sad note, almost of betrayal (I’m siding with Jean in this one) but there it is. It’s still an enjoyable watch though and in some ways does still feel like it belongs with the previous two, to an extent.

* I’m not quite ready to open the can of worms of Sylvia returning to the TV movies of Emmanuelle decades later... but I have looked up their availability, for sure.

Emmanuelle 2 - L’Anti-Vierge

 

Boat Full of Sea Men

Emmanuelle 2
Aka Emmanuelle L’anti-vierge
Directed by Francis Giacobetti
France 1975
Severin Films Blu Ray

Trigger warning: Taboo and illegal practices discussed and sometimes condemned. 

Okay, so I enjoyed Emmanuelle 2 a little more than the first movie in the series (reviewed here). That being said, it doesn’t really play with your expectations much in that it’s more in line with what I’d expect from a soft core erotic movie of the time and, I’m sure this is probably more the film that many audiences were expecting the first film to be.

That being said, for this audience member it certainly set up unrealistic expectations because its proper French title on the print is Emmanuelle L’anti-vierge and claims to be based on that book by Emmanuelle Arsan. However, having already read that book in preparation for watching this movie (you can read my review here), I’d have to say that very little of that book works itself into the ecosystem of the film adaptation. More on that a little later.

The plot, or anti-plot in this case, since it’s almost a reboot of the previous film and it’s practically non-existent, starts with Emmanuelle getting on a boat full of sea men and then travelling on a ship, in a dormitory with a load of tempting women, to be reunited with her diplomat husband Jean, who has been away on business for a couple of months. Then, with their ‘open marriage’, the film becomes a series of sexual encounters between the two of them and various lovers.

Sylvia Kristel reprises her role as a somewhat more intelligent (it seemed to me) iteration of the character (she seems to have lost the naivete of her book incarnation to some extent here) but, this time round, her husband is played by Umberto Orsini… who seems much more likeable.

The film has fantastic cinematography and every location, with slow fluid camerawork which seems to explore the environments in order to ‘find’ the characters, looks absolutely beautiful. Needless to say (or needles to say, if commenting on the ‘sexy acupuncture’ sequence) this also goes for the sex scenes and all the actors come off well in these.

Highlights for me would be that somewhat silly but fleshly decorative acupuncture sequence, a slight scene where Emmanuelle sexes up a tattooed guy in the changing rooms of the local polo club and their sounds are expertly mingled with the sound of the match outside and the panting horses… and a six way massage scene where the two take their friend Anna-Maria (played by Catherine Rivet) to a parlour where they are laid out on three tables and given erotic, body to body massages by three women simultaneously.

And here’s the thing about that last scene I talked about. The saucy masseur who sexes up Anna-Maria is an early appearance by none other than the great Laura Gemser, who would of course begin her long, iconic run as Italy’s Black Emanuelle (with one M only, for copyright reasons) the same year.

One other scene of note is when Emmanuelle is looking through some kind of cine-viewfinder while someone takes her from behind and the BDSM, double penetration, strap-on cartoon she is watching is intercut into the sequence. I love it when live action films present prominent animated scenes as part of their make up (it’s a pretty neat cartoon actually).

Okay… so there are some problems too. A prominent character from the first book, Christopher, makes it into this movie in some scenes from that book, kinda. Anna-Maria is more baffling because she’s treated here as a completely new character, played by a different actress to the pseudo-iteration of her in the first film (who had a slightly changed character name too, if memory serves). So that’s confusing.

And a big long monologue from Jean to that character in the second book is chopped up and interspersed through three scenes, with some overlaps to other characters and versions of those sentiments from the first book. Which is actually a better way of doing it in terms of the pacing within a cinematic context, I would say.

So most of the book is gone, including some really interesting scenes, characters and locales and, I have to wonder why, since the second book seems to have many more opportunities for cinematic opulence which have all been ignored here. Certainly, Emmanuelle Arsan’s philosophy of giving oneself to anyone regardless of your own desire is not adhered to or raised here. The only moment where there is a trace of her and her husband’s outlook on life regarding that particular aspect seems to be that, after making love to three sailors (not at a prince’s party with many sailors, as in the book) in a brothel called the Jade Garden (which, again, is nothing like the secret glass palace which serves a more intense version of it in the book), she at least takes money for her services. So that, at least, is an echo of boring character Mario’s ideas (and, fortunately, he doesn’t make a similar appearance in this movie at all).

As for the vile underage sex theme which somehow subtexts the novel, I’m pleased to say it’s been circumnavigated by this version completely. Emmanuelle and Jean do, indeed, deflower Anna-Maria towards the end of the movie (both together in this version of events) but it’s clearly stated here that she’s 18 years of age… and not five years younger as in the books.

All in all, although really a lot less interesting in terms of ideas found in the book it misleadingly purports to be an adaptation of, I found Emmanuelle - L’antivierge (or Emmanuelle 2 as it is more popularly marketed as, in many countries) to be a much lighter and entertaining picture than the first although, to be fair, it does also lack the substance and gravitas of the original Emmanuelle.

Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge - the novel

Arsan Around

Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
aka Further Experiences of Emmanuelle
aka Emmanuelle 2
By Emmanuelle Arsan 
Granada
ISBN 9780583125741

Trigger warning: Taboo and illegal practices discussed and sometimes condemned. 

“But the borderlines of my love aren’t identical with the frontiers of her flesh.”
Jean, Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge

Originally published in a clandestine edition in 1960, following on from the ‘official publication’ of the first novel in the series from the year before (and reviewed here), Emmanuelle L’Anti Vierge has a few different titles like Further Experiences Of Emmanuelle but, the title I have managed to get hold of is a British Granada paperback tying in with the name of the second movie, Emmanuelle 2. And, of course, the actual authorship of this volume is an enigma as to whether it was Arsan or her husband writing all these novels but, I suspect it was a collaborative arrangement. Much like the declared state of being by the main character and her husband as a combined, erotic creature and, one supposes, based on the real life experiences of the two who, as I mentioned in my review of the first tome, influenced Thai culture and brought about the swinging sex scene there. Although I now suspect something far more sinister was lurking underneath that but… yeah, not sure and, all I have to go on is the subject matter of these fictionalised exploits.

Now, I have to say that I think this sequel is infinitely better than the first novel. You may remember I talked about the ‘stops dead tonal shift’ when an excessively boring character called Mario dominates the last third of the book and pontificates about the duty and intricacies of a self sacrificing erotic pathway for humanity. Well, sad to say he’s back in this one and the first twenty pages or so are more of him and his boring philosophy. However, he happily leaves the narrative for most of the book and his further interruptions are nowhere near as tiresome and, although further elucidation and exploration of his philosophy are much invoked by various characters, it’s all mixed in with the sexual shenanigans one would expect from ‘an erotic novel’ and so the pill is significantly sweetened.

Now the ‘plot’ of the novel is very simple. Emmanuelle continues to explore different lovers of various gender (and multiples thereof) throughout the tale, as part of her ‘free marriage’ to Jean, while further exploring her path extending Mario’s original line of reasoning. So, yeah, it’s very simple, for sure, but there’s a lot of interesting and downright unusual stuff going on too.

For example, a prince gives a party where Emmanuelle is sexed up by many men (and women). Another scene at a fancy dress ball where she takes part in a happily obscene tableaux as one of many dressed as specific birds conjures up satisfyingly surreal images of something like Max Ernst’s Une Semaine De Bonté or the bird mask worn in the 1960s update of Judex. Or how about being anally taken by a buddhist monk who presents a golden dildo to her in return for services rendered by her to his religion.

Another thing which features heavily in a couple of chapters is a huge glass building with thick glass walls that don’t reveal what’s going on inside due to the sheer density of glass. It’s at a hidden location and can only be entered by driving to a secret, underground entrance and being raised into the ground floor of the building. This is basically a high class brothel with very specific rules where Emmanuelle plies her trade, once her character is taken with the idea that to be truly free, one must prostitute oneself to all and sundry. It’s here, in the only truly emotional high point of the novel, that Emmanuelle finally finds her ex lover Bee but, out of conscience, rejects her advances. It’s one of three powerful moments in the novel but the other two are decidedly strange…

And are as follows…

There’s one scene where Emmanuelle is coerced by a Dr. Marais (I couldn’t find any history on whoever his real life counterpart is) who is experimenting with a course of drugs that makes women easy to control and manipulated erotically. The book turns almost into a horror novel at this point but Emmanuelle says, after her first dosage and evening of debauchery, that she will not be back for another shot and… the book makes no mention of it in the following chapters and it’s all forgotten about, it seems. Until… until, much later in the book, a headline from a newspaper is read that Marais is wanted in connection with a police enquiry regarding a dead woman found his flat. I guess it was a lucky escape for Emmanuelle but, it makes almost a weird non-sequitur of a scene, to be honest.

But not as unusual a non-sequitur as the random scene which just appears out of the blue half way through a chapter, where two lovers, fleeing an authority and being chased by dogs, end up in their dishevelled state making love in a ditch. It seems completely divorced from the content and characters in any of the rest of the book and is a bit of a curio. I was expecting the other shoe to drop later on in the novel as it did with the murderous doctor but, no... no clue. The best way, then, to take it is that maybe it’s a metaphor for the pursuit and practice of Emmanuelle and Jean’s erotic principles but, if that is the case (and I’ve no reason to assume my best guess is right here) then maybe it would have been better relocated towards the end of the book when Jean and Emmanuelle are expounding those theories.

Now, I’d hoped the underage sex thing which permeated the sensibilities of the first novel would be happily absent from this second volume and, for the most part they are. But, when they do come they are much more blatant and I really don’t know why this vile spin is allowed to be published now, even in the wake of the court cases revolving around Lady Chatterly’s Lover, I think this kind of morally reprehensible stuff has no place in adult literature. However, Emmanuelle’s treatise at one point (though discarded by the main character soon after) includes ‘younger people‘ in it and, towards the end of the book, Emmanuelle ‘deflowers’ her best friend (before dripping sperm from her own mouth into her friend’s mouth after she is taken by three brothers on a beach). Nothing wrong in that per se but, you will probably at some point remember that her friend is only 13 years old in the previous novel and that this one is set six months later. So you can do the maths on that yourself!

However, this vile ingredient of the books aside, in general I enjoyed Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge quite a lot, with the obvious exceptions. At least now I can watch the second movie with somewhat of a critical eye to adaptation. So that’s next on my list.

Emmanuelle

Arsan About

Emmanuelle
Directed by Just Jaeckin
France 1974 
Severin Films Blu Ray

Trigger warning: Taboo and illegal practices discussed and condemned. 

The 1974 film adaptation of Emmanuelle was a big thing when it came out back in 1974, even to a young six year old like myself, who had already been working as a child model for the last five years. I remember, whenever I went down into London to do a shoot, the posters for the film were on display in places like the tube stations in London... not to mention the book being sold in ‘most reputable book shops’. The two posters I specifically remember were the very clever drawing of the snake symbolising temptation, unwrapping its coils from around an apple shape which turned out to be a lady’s derriere plus, of course, the famous Wicker Chair shot of lead actress Sylvia Kristel, which I think was also used in various newspapers and magazines like Time Out, to sell the film. 

And this is actually, kind of, a good adaptation of the book Emmanuelle (which I reviewed just here) but with scenes rearranged a little and some characters either cut out or, in one case, given a bit of a resolution. There is also a contentious addition which I’ll talk about too... which puzzles me a little, both in terms of what the heck it’s doing here and also why the lead actress was pressured into doing it.

First of all... the film is beautifully shot and edited. Sweeping views with establishing shots which sometimes have the actors walking into the back of the shot (which is a good idea and really works) and even some beautiful, pace changing, hand held camera movements in a couple of scenes which really add to the atmosphere of the story. Such as when a houseboy chases one of the maids around the grounds of Emmanuelle and Jean’s house. Incidentally, her husband Jean is played here by Daniel Sarky but, the way the character is written here is with a more emotional viewpoint... so there are times when he feels the absence of Emmanuelle when she’s off galavanting. Which, I won’t lie, detracts from the spirit of the novel a little bit.

And it’s rather well acted too, particularly by Sylvia Kristel, who gives a very naturalistic performance. It’s quite a striking turn in a way because, even from the opening scenes where she gets up and prepares her breakfast (in a not dissimilar sequence in intent to the opening of the movie version of The IPCRESS File, reviewed here, where Michael Caine goes through a similar preparatory routine), she uses her facial expressions and body language in a very considered performance but, at the same time, it’s a performance which underlines somewhat the naivete of the character... so, yeah, I can immediately see why audiences were drawn to Kristel’s rising star... not in terms of her looks (yeah, she looks fine, obviously) but more from the way her screen presence takes over.  

I’m not going to go through the whole story because it’s almost exactly the same as the book which I reviewed on the link earlier... Emmanuelle joining her husband in Thailand and having sexual encounters with various men and women... but there are differences. 

For example, her infatuation with the character of Bee is expanded and handled in a much more satisfying way... showing the love the two women share and ending with Bee’s ultimate rejection here... whereas in the novel she just kind of quickly drifted out of the narrative in a non-commital way.  And there are things like the relocation of the opening plane sex sequences from the book, replaced to a flashback sequence later in the movie (and with no children watching in this version, thank goodness).

Now then... the intensely boring scenes with Mario, played here by Alain Cuny, are downsized and made less boring by the way it’s presented in different locations in a kind of montage but... there’s a scene here where he takes Emmanuelle to be gang raped and, while the philosophy behind the character does support this kind of act in the book (and I was surprised something like this never happened in the book itself), it’s shown in a brutal way but with absolutely no consequences and change in the relationship between Emmanuelle and Mario after. And, yeah, I did think it was kind of going against the spirit of the novel here, to be sure. 

Now here’s a thing about that last point... Kristel did not want to do that scene but the director was insistent because it was in the book. Which makes me wonder if a) Kristel had actually read the book or b) if there’s a more expanded version of the book I’ve not read because, honestly, I finished the book two days before I watched the movie and I don’t remember this scene in there. 

Now then, the obvious  problem of underage sex which bizarrely permeates the book is not actually present in the film... except it is. Basically, if you know the book then you kind of know what’s going on in certain scenes and, if you’ve not read the book, no disclosures about the ages of certain characters are given. For instance, Emmanuelle’s masturbatory and dominant friend Marie-Ange was played here by Christine Boisson, who shot this film when she was just seventeen and, though she looks very young in the movie, there’s nothing given away here vocally that the character is supposed to be 13 years old. It’s all very iffy and I was torn between my love of a faithful adaptation and the fact that, nobody wants to see underage sex in anything thank you very much. So that material is not nearly as insidious in its inclusion as it was in Emmanuelle Arsan’s original book but, if you know the book then it’s kinda there if you want it. And if you want it then there’s probably something wrong with you, to be honest. 

This beautiful transfer of the film I watched is part of Severin’s wonderful Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection, which includes both the slightly shorter Director’s Cut and also the original release version, which is what I watched, that includes the small sequence the director didn’t want in of the Thai lady using her vagina to puff away on a cigarette as part of her nightclub act. And that’s me just about done with the 1974 adaptation of Emmanuelle but... I’m certainly not done with the character and her various, spelling challenged spin offs yet. See you back here tomorrow, I hope.

The Sand Pebbles

Arsan Pebbles

The Sand Pebbles
USA 1966 
Directed by Robert Wise 
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight, implied spoilers.

CHINA 1926 . . . RAVAGED FROM WITHIN BY CORRUPT WARLORDS... OPPRESSED FROM WITHOUT BY THE GREAT WORLD POWERS WHO HAD BEATEN CHINA TO HER KNEES A CENTURY BEFORE... CHINA...A COUNTRY OF FACTIONS TRYING TO UNITE TO BECOME A NATION . . . THROUGH REVOLUTION.
from The Sand Pebbles

Based on a book by Richard McKenna, The Sand Pebbles is a story about the Chinese revolution of 1926 and the xenophobic relations, on both sides, between China and the USA. Steve McQueen plays Jake Holman, a navy engineer who is transferred to the USS San Pablo to join up with them and run their engines, in order to continue to take the boat running up and down the river, in order to demonstrate an American presence on Chinese waters. However, the catch is that, unless an American life is endangered, they are not allowed to shoot against the Chinese, just stay neutral so they don’t incite a war. 

The film mostly takes place on board the ship but also goes off shore to a bar and whorehouse where the navy men go at night. Shenanigans ensue with a sub-plot for a virgin sex worker who is asking a very unaffordable $200 in order to get her some place else and, also, Holman’s day-to-day trying to work around an engineering section controlled by local Chinese people... and also inadvertently starting a romance with the film’s lead actress, not to mention trying to raise money for his friend Frenchy to free and ultimately marry the sex worker. Everything piles up and, consequence after consequence of various bad decisions bring th film to a fairly bleak climax, it has to be said. 

Now, I’ve never seen this film before but I’ve ben very well aware of it, primarily due to the fantastic score by Jerry Goldsmith (which I own in a couple of versions and have also heard him do excerpts in concerts over the years... I sure miss going to see Goldsmith when he hit town in London). Luckily for me, the Blu Ray includes his opening Overture and also keeps in his Intermission music. So good for them. 

The cast is phenomenal. In addition to McQueen you have Candice Bergen playing his missionary love interest, Richard Attenborough as Frenchy (who would later cast Bergen in one of the films he directed, namely Gandhi), Richard Crenna who is the captain of the ship, the great Simon Oakland, Mako (playing the engineer McQueen trains up to help run the engine room), Joe Turkell and James Hong. Turkell and Hong, of course, would later appear as Dr. Eldon Tyrell and Chew the Eye Maker in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (reviewed by me here). 

And, the sex worker known as Maily is played by Marayat Andriane... which is, of course, the name used by Emmanuelle Arsan for this (or probably vice versa actually, since her actual name was Marryat Rollett-Andriane), the first of her three acting roles - one in a TV episode, this one and, based on her novel, Laure (reviews of both the book and the movie adaptation will be coming to this blog as part of this series of reviews). So she’s the reason why I’ve finally given some retina time to The Sand Pebbles and, of her performance, I’d have to say it’s a pretty strong supporting role and she has a lot of presence. 

There have been rumours, never actually confirmed as far as I can find out (although I wish they’d translate that new biography that came out last year in France into English at some point) that she had an affair with McQueen. If that’s ever confirmed, judging from what I’ve found out about her from my readings and a smidgeon of research, reading between the lines, I would guess that McQueen would have been seeing both her and her husband and probably the various members from the swinging scene in Thailand that allegedly sprang up around her and her husband. But, as I said, the reports are completely unconfirmed and just rumours (as far as I know). That being said, McQueen gave up acting for a year due to the turmoil and the physical and emotional stress of a difficult shoot. Whether Arsan had anything to do with that stress is anybody’s guess. 

Either way, I’m glad I finally caught up to this film because it’s excellent, which is what I should have expected from a director with the calibre of Robert Wise, who uses certain elements of the original source as a metaphor for what was going on in Vietnam at the time. Even I could see the parallels. 

The film is intriguing with the dialogue, well performed by a cast of very good actors, has you on the edge of your seat for quite a lot of its running time and has some beautiful photography and compositions. It’s like Robert Wise can’t help himself on that last point. Even a shot of the crewmen repelling borders by unleashing hoses full of water on Chinese people trying to board the vessel conjures up a fair few rainbows in the water they are pumping. It’s great stuff.

And then there’s Jerry Goldsmith’s wonderful score. Goldsmith was always good at spotting a movie, which is the process of deciding where to position the musical cues in a movie and when to leave it silent. The Sand Pebbles is pared back quite a bit in the scoring, with long sequences playing without any music, which of course allows the music to do some heavy lifting when it suddenly rushes back in to fill that void. And it works like a charm here. On the strength of this score, Jerry was given the assignment of Planet Of The Apes (reviewed here) and didn’t look back. 

It’s a long film and certainly a satisfying one, considerably of the variety of ‘they don’t make movies like that anymore’. Indeed, I can’t imagine a project like this one would ever get greenlit in today’s, much less interesting climate of Hollywood movies, for sure. And the transfer from a gorgeous print found on the Blu Ray is something I wasn’t expecting from a major Hollywood studio, from whom I expect much less of a good job than from a proper, independent boutique label. But that’s me done with The Sand Pebbles and I’m glad I’ve finally ticked it off the long standing list, even if the ending is one you’ll see coming a long way off. 

Emmanuelle - the novel

 

Swinging Thailand

Emmanuelle
By Emmanuelle Arsan
Translated by Lowell Bair
Harper Perrenial
ISBN 9780007300402

Trigger warning: Taboo and illegal practices discussed and suitably condemned. 

Marryat Rollett-Andruane was a Thai-French woman who, in 1956, married a French diplomat called Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane. They settled in Thailand and their hedonistic lifestyle apparently gave birth to the swinger scene in that country. She was also an actress (and allegedly director), which I’ll probably get into in a later review but, under another name, she stars with Steve McQueen in the movie The Sand Pebbles (and quite possibly had him as one of the notches on her belt.. or below it at least). In 1959 she allegedly wrote and, certainly had published (originally anonymously), a novel apparently based on her real life sexual encounters called Emmanuelle. My understanding is that the book was banned and the publisher did some jail time for it (not sure where I read that as I can’t find that info now but I’m pretty sure that’s what I read and now I’ve read the actual novel I can better understand why that might have happened… yeah, I’ll get to that later).

In the late 60s the book was unbanned and published under her pen name Emmanuelle Arsan but, it’s alleged that her husband actually wrote the book. Personally I think this might have been a collaborative work because of the way the book is paced and, there’s also some evidence recently to suggest that may be the truth of the matter… yeah, I’ll ge to that pacing issue soon enough. 

Now I wanted to read this before I embarked on Severin’s small set of the white Emmanuelle films but, I really didn’t know what I was letting myself in for here. It wasn’t the explicit erotic elements that gave me pause for thought here… I’m all for that. Nope, it was another big element of the book which seemingly permeates the majority of the attitudes of the characters which both surprised me and made me wonder why this book is a) still published and b) hailed as an erotic masterpiece. Yeah, I’ll get to that element soon because I’m torn right now about wanting to call the book out for what it also is and... the idea that doing that might in some way endanger the publication of this blog. I’ll need to word this carefully at first… I think.

Okay, so the first impression I had as I started the tale, which tells of the French diplomat’s wife going to stay with him in Thailand and embarking on a polymorphous sexual journey (ha, I’m already being diplomatic with my wording) was that it’s full of sex. More than I’d expected… at first. Including the opening sex on a plane which I believe starts off the movie version and which I know starts off the movie Black Emanuelle (with one M to evade copyright problems… reviews will eventually be coming of that strand of films, is the plan). 

Now, some reviewers have called the book badly written but I disagree. I think it’s very well written and has a nice, almost poetic turn of phrase about it. For instance, rather than say such and such character laughed at her question, the book phrases it thusly… “This question let her discover Bee’s laugh!” And things like a woman’s sexual regions might be referred to as, say, her Astrakhan triangle. And the quality of the written sex is also pretty well done for erotica. I recently read a much lauded piece of erotic source for another review coming soon at some point here and the text was absolutely terribly written (cough… Behind The Green Door… cough) and this book is like Dickens compared to that stuff. A blow job, as given in the first half of the book, is rendered beautifully with words, for example. So I was actually fairly impressed by the writing. Although, since it’s translated from the French, one has to wonder if the skill of the writing lies in the original written word or the translator… something I’m sure I’ll never know.

Okay… then the book takes a turn for the worse. The sex disappears and a character called Mario enters the story. And then we get maybe 60 or more pages of unbelievably boring and terrible philosophy on the nature of eroticism. To say it’s dull would be an understatement. It’s stops the book stone cold and leaves it to die. It’s why I believe that maybe it was a husband and wife collaboration… with one writing the first half and one writing the other half.  It’s also at this point that you kind of realise how easily malleable and changeable the lead character’s mental outlook is. She seems somewhat fickle to the point of instability as each new sexual encounter… most of them open ended and not resolved in this particular text... takes place.

Now then, I’m calling this book out now because… well... I was surprised that a lot of the sexual encounters and discussions in the book take place within the company of minors. Underage sex is happening here and, though the victims of this are not portrayed as such, usually dominating and instigating some of the sexual content, it’s quite unsettling and makes me question the legality of the book (and makes me wonder just how far the film must deviate from the source to be allowed a cinema release… I guess I’ll find out soon). But, yeah, while it’s not all the book it certainly is an underlying part of the tale and it does not shy away from scenes of sexuality involving, well, youngsters. I’m astonished this book has been hailed as a classic and I’m just not sure what’s going on here… nor why the majority of the short snippet reviews on Amazon I quickly scanned to see if other people were calling it out, rarely mention this insidious aspect of the book, if at all. 

And that’s me done with the first Emmanuelle book, I think. While the book is quite engaging for the most part and offers surrealistic imagery such as an orchard of wooden penises hanging from the trees… the other stuff I mentioned in the last paragraph is a real deal breaker and I’d find it hard to recommend this thing to anybody. Now I have to see what’s happening in the movie version, I guess. I’m sure that element must have been stripped out of the tale, such as it is (more a series of episodic encounters than a tale, truth be told). 

Seven Samurai

Village Of The Doomed

Seven Samurai
aka Shichinin no samurai 
Directed by Akira Kurosawa 
Japan 1954
Toho/BFI Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilers.

“Find hungry samurai. Even bears leave the forest when they’re hungry.”
Seven Samurai

What can one say when talking about Seven Samurai? 

The film was made by my favourite director, Akira Kurosawa, around the same time that both Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto, starring Toshiro Mifune (my second favourite all time actor) and Godzilla, starring Takashi Shimura (my all time favourite actor) were also being filmed. This film stars both these actors in the leading roles (I seem to remember they were friends and next door neighbours for a time, too). All three films were expected to sink Toho studios without trace so, with Kurosawa filming for an unexpected 148 days and with costs going four times over the projected budget, you can understand why production was shut down a number of times. Kurosawa’s alleged response was to just go off fishing, figuring that the studio had already spent so much money, they wouldn’t want to pull the plug. 

However, all three of those films have stood the test of time and ended up saving Toho Studios and securing its future as the number one Japanese studio of all time. Japanese critics at that time were somewhat soured on the film, claiming it to be too Westernised. Kurosawa, while freely admitting that he was somewhat influenced by the cinema of John Ford, made something that took in a lot of money in Japan, regardless of these criticisms. And of course, many films (including Westerns) have been remakes of Kurosawa films... in terms of Seven Samurai, my favourite two remakes would be The Magnificent Seven and Battle Beyond The Stars (reviewed by me here).

The story is well known and it consists of bandits threatening to raid and pillage a village, once the barley has ripened and been harvested... with a small bunch of the poor farmers journeying to a town to try and hire a number of samurai to protect them when this occurs, although all they can offer is three meals a day. Seven are acquired and, by the end of the three and a half hour picture, only three are left standing... and one of them stays to join the farming community, pursuing a local girl.

The film starts off brilliantly and, after about a quarter of an hour of the farmers being taunted and jeered at in town (and after, I think, we get a very brief glimpse of future Kurosawa regular and acting giant  Tatsuya Nakadai playing... and I quote the IMDB... ‘samurai wandering through town’), we finally meet three of the main characters. The lead, played by Takashi Shimura, has been hired to kill a thief holding a local baby hostage, holed up in a barn. In a scene which must have ben absolutely electrifying to Japanese audiences at the time (let alone the characters of the town people watching him do it) he slices off his top knott (something unheard of for a samurai, even a ronin such as that which Shimura plays) and shaves his head to look like a priest. Then, with a clever ruse utilising two balls of rice, he makes short work of the thief who we see only in aftermath, in slow motion, as he rushes out of the barn and then falls to the floor. 

Now I can’t write a whole book about this movie for one blog entry (although some people have... you should maybe read one) but even this scene gives a look at the genius of Kurosawa (apart from the dynamic use of slow motion and editing which is used more than once in the movie). And I'm talking about the way he puts people who will become important a little later in the film into the audience’s mind by stealth. For instance, the character of ‘the kid’,  Isao Kimura, walks in behind a group of six watchers in the 4:3 frame behind them (making a group of seven, not the last time this number of characters in a frame crop up in the film) and when they all leave to follow the action, he stays in frame for a few seconds, which embeds him into the audience consciousness when, a few minutes later, he turns out to be one of the leads. 

And not only that... the next shot where he walks behind a bunch of onlookers watching the show from behind, with the camera now looking at the scene from behind him, Toshiro Mifune’s character is sitting on the floor in the shot too. It’s all good stuff and is just another sign that Kurosawa was an absolute master of his art. As is his use of verticals to compartmentalise a frame a while later, in a believable way while still conforming to the small, almost square frame of the aspect ratio. It’s great stuff.

And the drama between all the characters is absolutely amazing... even though my two favourite characters in the film played by two other Kurosawa regulars... Minoru Chiaki and  Seiji Miyaguchi... are both dead by the end of the story. There are also some of the greatest action sequences in movie history, with frenetic editing, fury and sound, especially the final battle where everyone is slipping around and drenched in rain and mud. It’s a film which truly sticks in the mind, not least because of  Fumio Hayasaka’s phenomenal score (I even like the song version of the main samurai theme, not used in the movie but which is in one of the discs in the first of the Kurosawa soundtrack box sets put out in Japan some decades ago) which livens things up when it needs to and which also, in one particular theme, seems almost the inspiration for Elmer Bernstein’s bandit theme from the remake known as The Magnificent Seven.

Another thing I like about the movie, a concept sadly lost nowadays, mostly, is that there is respect for the older people in the village. When the villagers are stuck and don’t know what to do, they go and see the village elder and listen and take note of his wisdom... a nice thing to see. 

Decades ago, a friend and I went to see a day long bunch of seminars about Kurosawa at the National Film Theatre, followed by one of the movies (I think it may have been The Hidden Fortress). Among the guests were Kurosawa’s friend and biographer, the late, great Donald Richie and, also, the great director Alex Cox. Cox had a bunch of postcards representing all of Kurosawa’s films and he asked the audience to vote on whether each film was a ‘masterpiece’ or not, implying that this is a good way to tell the worth of a film director. In the case of this experiment, there were well over half of the director’s films which were argued by various members of the public as being masterpieces... which really says something about how well appreciated this director is. And, of course, nobody hesitated in proclaiming Seven Samurai a masterpiece. If you’ve not seen this one, maybe sort out that oversight sometime. One of the most entertaining films in the history of cinema, for sure.

Loki Season 2

Loki Cokey

Loki Season 2
USA 2023
Marvel/Disney
6 episodes 

Okay, so I’ve finally caught up with Loki Series Two and the good news is... it’s markedly better than the first series. It might be because all of the episodes here are directed by the great Benson and Moorhead but, given the absolute state of Disney’s Marvel TV shows (not to mention the Star Wars franchise they’re also currently ruining), it counts for a lot, I think, that this follow up series is any good at all.

Once again, this one stars Tom Hiddleston, reprising his role as the multiversal variant of Loki who split off from the regular timeline in Avengers Endgame (reviewed here) and, also returning are most of his co-stars. These include the brilliant Sophia Di Martini as a female variant Loki, Owen Wilson as Mobius, Wunmi Musaku and Gugu Mbatha-Raw and... Jonathan Majors as ‘the big bad’. We also have a new regular, the delightful time scientist OB (aka Ourouboris) played by legendary actor Ke Huy Quan… aka a grown up Short Round from Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, who also won an Oscar last year for Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (reviewed here).

Now, if you remember my review of the first series of Loki (reviewed here), you will remember I said it had one weakness which was to introduce or re-enforce Jonathan Majors (from Ant-Man And The Wasp - Quantumania, reviewed here) as the ultimate threat to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and so all the episodes seemed ultimately to play second fiddle to that idea. And the post credits on one of the Marvel movies featuring that actor along with Loki and Mobius, I forget which one now, dovetails into an episode here.

Well, there’s a similar weak point here. Now that Majors has been found guilty of spousal abuse and effectively cancelled, it’s pretty clear that he can no longer go on to be the future lead villain of what, I assume would be, a future Avengers movie. So, although Majors is in this a lot, mostly playing a much nicer template variant named after the original comics company that became Marvel… Timely… this series is very much involved in a single story arc to eradicate him as the big bad of the future, effectively writing him out of any future Marvel movies and TV projects. So the whole of the series pretty much just serves this resolution… albeit in the most twisted way imaginable.

That being said, it’s certainly a very fun and fast paced series despite, like the first one, not having many action sequences… even less I would say. But it doesn’t matter because it’s lightning fast and though a lot of it is expository dialogue, most of which I didn’t understand a word of by the final episode, it never gets dull and the performances of the high calibre actors involved certainly carries it. Also, although I clearly should have watched this before going to see Deadpool And Wolverine (reviewed here), it didn’t really matter that it includes one of the lead characters in a position of Time Variance Agency authority, which she hasn’t yet attained here.

Ultimately, then, I really enjoyed this second series of Loki way more than the first and, though I’m sure it’s almost certain that Loki himself will return (in films for sure and maybe even a third series), this one doesn’t leave things on a cliff hanger… it has a definitive ending. Which is a bit unusual for modern Marvel I must say. And no episode here has any kind of post credits sequence attached to it… so I am grateful to latch onto those small mercies while I can.

Ronin

Masterless Masterclass

Ronin
USA/UK 1998 
Directed by John Frankenheimer 
United Artists Blu Ray Zone B

I haven’t revisited Ronin for years and so it was time for a Blu Ray upgrade of one of my all time favourite Frankenheimer films. John Frankenheimer will always be best remembered for some of the classic Hollywood films such as Seconds, Grand Prix and French Connection II but this one, made just four years before he died, is the one which I think is his most clever and compelling watch. 

The title of the film is a metaphor for a bunch of ex-secret service/military individuals who are brought together by Natascha McElhone’s Diedre... who you assume is working for the IRA, to steal (with deadly force) a case containing something which you never find out. Yeah, that’s right, the case is a classic Hitchcockian McGuffin and is unimportant in itself, other than it completely drives the action of the movie relentlessly forward. So, the team she puts in place is almost iconic... we have Robert DeNiro, Jean Reno, Sean Bean, Stellan Skarsgård and Skipp Sudduth. And they, almost, could all be the Ronin of the title... a term which, in ancient Japan, meant a masterless samurai who would often pick up jobs from various sources... apart from one character but, to reveal who that character is would be a spoiler. You don’t find out until the end anyway. 

And there is action, betrayal, unexpected deaths and one of, to my mind, the best car chases in cinema history (the second one of the two in this film). It moves along at a fair lick with the first half an hour setting up the characters and revealing all you need to know about them, as they plan their method of attack and then, of course, we have ‘the heist gone wrong’ trope which leads to all the shenanigans of the rest of the movie. That’s all I’m saying about the plot. 

The film is up there with The Quiller Memorandum almost (reviewed here), in terms of how clever the various characters are written and, I reckon a lot of that must be due to the uncredited script doctoring by David Mamet. So highlights in that regard would be the opening, where DeNiro hides a gun behind a cafe he is supposed to be meeting up in and then, making a point of going to the toilet so he can ensure the back door is open so he can get out if the going gets tough. By the way, that scene switches from the streets of France to a studio replica of the same cafe by use of a travelling matte shot which is, I think, impossible to spot unless you know it’s there (the old DVD version of this had a commentary track by Frankenheimer, revealing things like this). 

Other things of interest are DeNiro’s use of a cup of coffee to first deliberately spill to test the reflexes of Skarsgård’s character and, later, to ‘ambush’ Sean Bean’s character to prove a point to the people he’s working for. And there’s one scene where DeNiro is talking to an old colleague where they are using coded dialogue, pretending to be strangers, so DeNiro can get some information. It’s not until the end of the movie until you realise that the conversation was also deliberately ‘loose’ to an extent and serving as a kind of ‘double blind’ should any of his new colleagues be listening. 

Another interesting thing is that the film has three James Bond villains in it but, bizarrely, they never appear in any scene together. So we have Sean Bean who was the villain in Goldeneye (reviewed here), Jonathan Pryce who was the bad guy in Tomorrow Never Dies (reviewed here) and, in a wonderful scene following on from a really well done bullet removal sequence, Michael Lonsdale, who played the villain in Moonraker (reviewed here). Lonsdale has an especially important scene with DeNiro as he is working on a model of a scene from the famous story of The 47 Ronin, explaining things to DeNiro and pushing certain metaphors home. 

This is still one of the great ‘caper’ action movies by my book and I would love to see this in a cinema again because I remember it looked great on a big screen. And especially for how it sounds... the car chases are noisy and everything is really spot on and intense during certain scenes. Also... and I don’t see this in a lot of films, to be honest... there are a lot of civilians being killed or injured during the various shoot outs and car chases on the streets of whatever country the central characters happen to be in at the time. Not to mention the spectacular ice dance death fall of world champion ice skater Katarina Witt, as the inadvertent girlfriend of one of the bad guys of the movie. 

All this and a knock out score by Elia Cmiral which really serves the film well and is also a great listen as a stand alone CD. Honestly, I can’t say enough good things about Ronin and, I’m surprised there aren’t a load of books written about this particular movie. I also wonder, since their chemistry is just so good in this, why DeNiro and Reno were not put in any more movies together... they both knock it out of the park here and play off each other really well. Definitely add this one to your hit list if you’ve never seen this marvellous gem before.